International Country Code, FIPS versus ISO 3166

International Country Code is a country listing that is used to uniquely identify a geopolitical entity (countries, dependencies, and areas of special sovereignty). The country code consists of International Standards Organization (ISO) 3166-1, Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 10-4 and many more. Codes been used to save time and to avoid errors, instead of using a country’s name. This is due to the fact that a country’s name will be spelt differently depending on the language being used.

United State Federal Government has developed the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) and announced the FIPS publicly. The FIPS standards are developed to allow all branches of the government to have a standard way to refer to entities. For instance, the FIPS country code act as a standard for encoding data. The FIPS 10-4 standard is a list of two-character country codes which were used for geopolitical entity identification. The FIPS 10-4 country codes are partially compatible with ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes.

In addition to the FIPS standard, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has also published their standard which is known as ISO 3166. The ISO 3166-1 uses part of the names as the codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 1: Countries codes. The ISO 3166-1 is used to define the geographical data with the names of countries and dependent territories. The ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 is a list of two-character country codes that is considered the global standard at present.

The following table shows all countries supported in GeoDataSource data.